At the present time, multistrand roving packages of glass fibres are conventionally wound in a secondary winding operation.
That is to say, sliver packages are firstly spirally wound in a conventional manner by drawing a multiplicity of glass filaments, from a former containing molten glass and past an applicator for applying size or coating material, with the filaments split into e.g. four strands.
In the secondary winding operation, a plurality of such sliver packages are creeled and roven together through a single guide eye to form a multistrand roving package.
It has now become particularly desirable, for economic reasons, to be able to wind multistrand roving packages from the strands as soon as the latter have been produced, i.e. in a single winding operation directly following the filament forming instead of in the secondary winding mentioned above.
Furthermore, it is desirable to be able to wind a larger number of strands into a multistrand roving package than has been possible hitherto.
Moreover, whether or not the multistrand roving package is wound directly or in a secondary winding operation, it has been found that there is a distinct need to improve over prior multistrand winding methods by providing greater precision of the winding and thus better defined package edges and split efficiency than has been possible hitherto. As will be known to those well versed in the art, the split efficiency is the ratio of the number of splits or strands obtained on unwinding a multistrand package to the number of splits or strands which were originally wound into the package.